


You Don't Have To Leave to Arrive

by AlwaysLera



Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: BAMF Natasha, Budapest, Clint Barton Feels, Clint Feels, Deaf Character, Deaf Clint, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Feels, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Multi, Romantic Friendship, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2013-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-24 08:12:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 19,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/632310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And she tells him, “They write stories about people like us. Damaged and rough around the edges and in love.” And he says, “Is that what this is? Love?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Every chapter starts with a quote from Andrea Gibson, one of the most talented, raw, and honest poets out there. Check her out! She publishes through WriteBloody and she does slam poetry which is all over Youtube. You'll see why I think she has a poem for every possible moment of anyone's life, even Clint and Natasha's.
> 
> I don't own these characters, etc etc etc.
> 
> (Fic title also from a Gibson poem :))

**_I said to the sun, “Tell me about the big bang.” The sun said, “It hurts to become.” – Andrea Gibson_ **

 

Hawkeye brought the Black Widow in against orders from S.H.I.E.L.D. higher ups, and it became the legend around the helicarrier. All of this was unbeknownst to Clint who, two days after bringing in the spitfire angry Russian, was dispatched to some remote corner of the world to guard the transport of rogue nuclear materials back into safeguarding hands. And truth be told, he forgot about the girl with the red hair. When he walked the top of the train, slept, fitfully, in his bunk, and when he took his coffee extra hot and black, his hands tight around the cup to guard against the cold, he thought nothing of her. When he checked in with his handler Phil Coulson, he was always vaguely surprised when Coulson mentioned something about her. He would shrug, ignore that part of the message, and then relay his coordinates. Coulson would verify them and they would dip back into radio silence. Clint did not think of her.

 

It would be hard to say the same of the Black Widow. Once she was deprogrammed, once she had detoxed from the sounds and machinery of the Red Room in her head, she fell into a routine with Coulson who gradually introduced the reticent, aloof, cold girl to the ways of SHIELD. He set up a training routine for her, gave her sparring partners, and when she beat the shit out of those partners, he found her new ones. He met her every morning for coffee—and then, when he realized how much she disliked coffee, tea. She almost smiled the first time he set a cup of tea in front of her. Almost. Coulson made it a personal mission to make Barton’s mistake work out for SHIELD. And that was how she was known around base. When she walked down the hall, they stared after her. Their eyes saw her curves, her lips, her eyes, the color of her hair which reflected into their own blood, their own eyes, their own curves, and eyes. They said when she walked by, _wonder if Barton fucked that before he left._ They said when she walked by, _wonder if she’s plotting to kill us._ They said when she walked by, _there goes the Black Widow,_ and she would keep walking. They expected her to be cold, so she was cold. They expected her to be deadly, so she never failed to pin them to the mat, pressed between her thighs, on that line between blacking out and being enthralled at being between her legs. She wanted to see it in their eyes: the knowledge that they were exactly in the same position that many men had died before.

She did not make friends, except, maybe, Coulson. The day he brought her tea, gave her a side smile and said, _you should have told me that you hated coffee_ , she almost smiled back. Instead, she looked into her tea and said, slowly, _you seemed to like getting me coffee_. She does not add the rest of the words, _and I did not have the heart to tell you any differently_ , because she did not have a heart. She was the Black Widow and she did not have a heart.

 

And it could not be said for her that she did not think of Barton. She thought of him because every day, his name was brought up around her. He brought her in. He caught her. He turned her. Like it had been his choice alone. Like no one else had been on that rooftop. No one else had been there when he shot her through the shoulder and she shot him in the knee, and he laughed, and she almost smiled, and they sat up there, bleeding, and he said, abruptly, that he had been in a circus, and she had said, less abruptly, that she feels like she had been in a circus. And they sat in silence for a long time before he said he didn’t want to kill her. And she had replied that for the first time in a long time, she didn’t want to die. There had been no grand plot. There had been no preemptive planning. There had just been two lonely people on a rooftop, bleeding out. And so they had helped each other. He had bandaged her shoulder, leaving most of the arrow in her for surgeons to remove, and she had removed the bullet and stitched his leg back up. They had limped, together, to the extraction site, arm slung over shoulder, shoulder slung over arm. And on the plane, no one said anything when he had leaned forward and said, _hey. Welcome_ , in that unassuming way of his, where he didn’t need to say a lot to mean a lot. It was the first time in her entire life that Natasha hadn’t felt alone.

 

She did not just think of him then, when they spoke of him in relationship to her, like he had won her in some pissing contest with the Motherland. She thought of him when she walked down a crowded hallway and people scattered like their presence would trigger her into becoming a mass killing machine. She thought of him when she pinned men to the mats and thought, desperately, where is he. And she thought of him when she stood out on the deck of the helicarrier and the wind whipped her hair around her face. It was the only time she let her hair down. She thought of him when she showered and her fingers found the scar on her right shoulder where her arm met her body from his arrow. After six months, she asked Coulson where he was. Coulson’s face was smooth when he replied, _classified_. And then he flinched slightly, and his voice softened, and he said, _he should be back soon_. And she nodded, like she understood what should and back and soon meant. Coulson thought she did. Everyone thought she did.

Still, she was walking down the hallway, back to her room after a training session, to change for a language lesson, when she saw him, and it shook her where she stood. She stopped, standing still, like she was afraid he would see her if she was moving, but he was talking to Coulson and they were walking towards her. And she watched at this distance as his hands gesticulated as he told some story, and his face broke into a wide grin, and to her surprise, Phil’s eyes lit up and he laughed, and smiled in return. Had she ever come home from a mission feeling so sure of herself? Had she ever come home from a mission as herself? People were scattering around her and Coulson looked up, saw her face, and blinked. He said something low and Barton’s eyes flickered upwards, and met hers. He smiled, strode ahead of Coulson, all purposeful, towards her, and it was everything in her power to stop herself from reacting to a threat. She told herself again and again that things were different now. That she had chosen to be on the same side as him.

“Hey,” he said cheerfully. “I hear things are going well and they’re going to start sending you out.”

Her mouth was dry. She said, her voice cold and sure, and with a hint of a Russian accent that she didn’t intend and hadn’t heard in months, “Yes.”

His eyebrows shot up like this was amusing. He said, “Good. I’ll see you around.”

Before he left, as he started to, his weight shifting onto the leg farthest from her, she heard herself say, “I am glad your mission went well.”

He froze and frowned at her, his head tilted and his eyes flinty and sharp suddenly, reminding her of the man who had tracked her through a dozen cities in less than four months. He said in a low voice, “Who said it went well?”

She blinked, surprised. “You seem happy.”

And there it was, suddenly, a crack in the corner of his mouth, and she realized that he could build walls that scaled the sky. He could build walls the way she could. Because there, for a moment, she could see the sadness spill out, and he said, “Appearances can be deceiving, darling.”

She said automatically, “Don’t call me darling.”

And she watched him carefully this time, watched the way his eyes were full of heaviness and grief, but his mouth tipped up, and she thought she knew that type of smile, where you couldn’t stop it but it was held back by everything you carried in your mind and on your shoulders and in every bullet—or arrow—you released.

He said, “Sure.”


	2. Chapter 2

  
  
_this is for no becoming yes_   
_this is for fear becoming trust_   
_this is for saying i love you to people who will never say it to us_   
_for scraping away the rust_   
_and remembering how to shine_   
_for the dime you gave away when you didn’t have a penny_   
_for the many beautiful things we do_   
_for every song we’ve ever sung_   
_for refusing to believe in miracles_   
_because miracles are the impossible coming true,_   
_and everything is possible – Andrea Gibson_

 

In the hallways, the rumors said,  _he definitely fucked her. Ask him, Bud, I dare you. Ask him what the Widow’s like in bed. I bet she can go for hours._

She avoided him for two days. Two days, until when Coulson sat down and plunked her tea in front of her, Barton sat down too. She stiffened and said to Coulson, “What’s he doing here?”

Coulson shrugged.  _He’s taking you out on your first mission._

“No,” she said.

“Natalia,” says Barton quietly, and she closes her eyes.

 _Barton,_  says Coulson warningly.

“Oh, fuck. Right. Natasha, now, right?” Barton leans back and crosses his arms. “We’re partnered until they can trust you to not fuck things up. So, training room, ten minutes.”

Natasha opens her eyes and snaps, “No one orders me around. Not now.”

“It was a request with consequences,” and his smile is toothy and rough and she wants to know what it feels like against her skin. She shudders and his smile fades. He says, “If the idea of having a partner is so repulsive to you, you may try playing along. The sooner you prove yourself in the field, the sooner you can go solo. God only knows the helicarrier could use a break from you.”

She does not know what he means by this. She stands up and pours her tea out on the table, making Coulson and Barton leap backwards and out of their chairs to avoid their laps being burnt. They swear at her, and she leaves, making sure to sashay a little more than normal.

She does not know what he means by this but Clint doesn’t either. All he knows is that he has been back two days and he can’t get her out of his head. He hears it in the hallways and in the locker rooms, the men laugh and ask profane things. The professionalism instilled in SHIELD employees and the sexual harassment policy apparently end when it comes to the Black Widow and Clint knows why: because she is not a person to them. Because for six months, she hasn’t said more than a dozen words to people other than Coulson, because she looks like a doll, because she is aloof and has more walls and more razor wire than any prison camp he’s ever seen. He hadn’t thought of her, hadn’t worried about her, hadn’t even thought to check in with her since he left, and now he knows why Coulson mentioned her. Because Coulson was worried and he wanted Clint to come back and take care of his own. And she was his in a way that the rumors did not understand, and in a way Clint hadn’t understood until she had congratulated him on his mission and all he had wanted in that moment was for her to slip her arms around his neck and hold his face against her shoulder and he has never, not once, wanted physical comfort in that way from anyone. Sex, yes. Post mission sex could be some of the best sex he’s ever had. But he had never wanted to exhale a shuddering breath into a woman’s neck under her veil of hair in a public hallway with all of their clothing on. Not before that moment. Before she blinked at him in surprise. Before she had, possibly, seen him.

And she had been in his every waking thought since then, and his every dream, and yes, sometimes, it could get him hard, but he was only human and only male and he could be forgiven for that, if he never told her, if she never found out, and if it stayed a secret so she never thought that he thought of her the way everyone else in the goddamn world did. She was a person, he wanted to tell her, a beautiful, fragile, deadly, strong, dangerous, emotional, empathetic person, and he saw all of that now, and he did not know if she did, if she wanted him to see it, or if they could see it together.

But she wants nothing to do with him and he wants nothing to do with hurting her, so he’ll do his job. He’ll train her and then he’ll climb high again, back where no one could reach him, and he’ll do his job like he always did.

He goes back to his room after Coulson fails to talk him down and he changes into his training gear and heads down to the gym. On the way, a few guys stop and say,  _dude, relationship problems. We so get you._  And he does not punch them in the face, and he feels like he should be congratulated on this. He reminds himself to tell Coulson later. Coulson would find it funny, even if he acted patiently irritated at the time. He goes into the gym which is divided into several sections, and sees her immediately. There is a crowd around her, a healthy, safe, distance, behind glass, and they are watching her throw knives.

He approaches cautiously. The crowd parts to let him through and he stands at the glass, impressed. She is throwing knives at moving, darting, targets, misshapen and unpredictable, and hitting the red circle every single time. With her left hand. Her right hand is behind her back and untied but she doesn’t move it anyways. She ties a blindfold over her head and throws more knives. They don’t always hit the red circle, but they always hit the target. Her posture is superb and Clint wants to get every trainee he’s ever suffered through teaching to throw knives to watch this.

And at the end, when she’s out of knives, she spins and throws one at the glass.

People scream as it clatters off the glass right in front of Clint’s face. He grins at Natasha who looks surprised to see him. She had started to prepare her face to look cold, like she meant to throw it at him exactly, but his grin throws her off, and to his surprise, and hers, he thinks, she smirks back. She turns away and walks to the targets to collect the knives and Clint walks out of the glass room and onto the target range.

She says to him, her back turned, “Aren’t you afraid that I’m still working for the other side? I could kill you right now.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. He crosses his arms. “But I’ve faced down enough death in the last few months that a girl with a few knives doesn’t scare me.”

She whirls around and throws two knives that pierce the wall on either side of his head. His heart is pounding from fear but he forces himself to laugh at her. He says, “Yeah. Not like she came aim either. Christ, girl, one of these days you might hit something. Just keep throwing those knives.”

She is watching him warily, like she is confused by him. She prowls around the room, tossing and twirling and catching knives in her hands. She says, “You are afraid.”

He sobers up instantly, sensing to laugh at her now would be a grave, and possibly fatal, mistake. He says quietly, “Fear is a natural response to be faced with possible death.”

“Not for me,” she says, and she walks to the glass where she glances up at the spectators, and he sees it, he sees the sadness go across her body, and she lays all the knives in their boxes where they belong, and she shuts the lid. She says, her back turned to him. “Where to next?”

He says, “Let’s go for a run.”

She blinks, “Where?”

He has surprised her. He revels in that for a moment. “The deck.”

She gets a knowing look in her eye. “Hawks don’t belong inside.”

He shrugs. “I’m no more a hawk than you are a spider.”

She is definitely sad now. She says, “Then you must be covered in feathers under all those clothes.”

He smirks. “Thinking about what I look like under my clothes?”

And it is the wrong thing to say. Her eyes dart to the window of spectators. He flinches and says, “I’m sorry. That was thoughtless.”

She looks surprised at him. “So you’ve heard them too.”

He wonders if she knows that the window is not soundproof. He says slowly, “Yeah. I’ve heard them.”

She lifts her chin. “So do you think the same way, Hawkeye? Am I a conquest? Am I a trophy? Did you fuck me before or after you turned me? Before you brought me in?”

He takes a strong menacing step towards her and she matches his stance, her shoulders squared. He growls, “You know that I don’t think that.”

She lets out a breathless laugh. “How do I know?”

He is too tired for this conversation. He says, “Because you only fuck before you kill and I’m alive.”

Her shoulders sink down, slightly, and then straighten. He watches this. He watches her piece herself back together and it is mesmerizing. He takes a step closer to her and she flinches, so he stops. He says, “Time to run.”

She leaves the room first.

They run laps around the helicarrier, ducking through the hangers at both ends, running around men and women driving carts full of expensive supplies and weaponry who yells at him. She won’t let him fall behind, and at first, he thinks that it’s a gift, but then he realizes that she doesn’t like people behind her. She slows and adjusts her pace to match his. She can go for farther than him, and he thinks about telling that to the people in the hallways.  _Yeah, sure, she can go all night. Runs a four minute mile you know._ And it makes him laugh while running. That makes her look at him sideways, suspicious and closed off. He runs next to her because he can, because it seems like the best way to burn off her excessive energy. His muscles are still sore from the mission and after their fourth lap, or tenth mile, he waves her off, stumbles to a walk, and doubles over.

She stops, when he doesn’t expect her too. He can see her legs in her training gear and the sight is not helping him catch his breath. She says to him, her voice just on this side of breathless, “Done so soon, Hawkeye?”

“Archer. Assassin. Sniper,” he manages to say. “Not an athlete.”

“You tracked me through twelve cities,” she says, and he looks up to catch a fleeting brief brightness in her eyes that looked dangerously close to amusement. “I ran sometimes. You followed. You are a liar.”

He grins. “Not as much as you are.”

For a split second, he thinks he is going to regret saying that. Then she sits down on the deck next to him, stretching her legs in front of her, her toes curling in her sneakers into points, and then relaxing again. She takes down her hair, shakes it, and puts it up. He cannot look away. She is endlessly fascinating and he does not understand why. As she’s wrapping her hair back up, she looks sideways at him. She says, “When are they sending us out?”

He shrugs. “Next week. I think. Coulson tells me when he thinks I should know.”

She nods. She says, “I like him.”

Clint looks up at the sky and says, “Coulson is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Are you going to elaborate?” She asks in the silence that follows. He shakes his head and she says, “Okay.”

He looks at her sideways. “Why do you like him?”

“He takes me for what I am,” she says simply. “I don’t have to pretend to be one of them,” and she gestures at the hulking shadow of the helicarrier looming over them. “He knows I am not one of them.”

“No,” he agrees. “You aren’t.”

He almost misses the flinch. But he doesn’t. She says, “It would be easier if I was.”

He meets her gaze this time, holds it. “Yeah. It would be. But I thought the point of this was to be more you, not more like what some organization wanted you to be.”

She is quiet then, for a long time, studying his face, like she’s trying to see the lie on him. She sighs and gets up, offering him a hand up. He takes it and she pulls him to his feet. They are standing close together and he drops her hand. Her eyes are laughing when she whispers, “They’re watching out the windows.”

He grins back at her. “Hawkeye and the Widow, they’re totally doing it.”

“Right here,” she murmurs, her eyes still intent on his. “On the deck.”

His throat closes and he says, “I was thinking the wing of a plane.”

She says, “I’d get sunburnt.”

He says, “God, I hope we’d be out there that long.”

And there’s almost a laugh, and there’s almost a smile, and there’s almost gratitude in her eyes when she turns away and starts to run back down the deck. Clint lets out the breath he did not know he was holding, groans, and starts running after her.

He looks up out of the corner of his eye. She was right. They are watching. He smiles and thinks,  _let them._

  



	3. Chapter 3

  
  
**_You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, we can’t even touch each other’s hearts without a tetanus shot. – Andrea Gibson_ **

He puts her into a strict training regime, like she wasn’t fit, like she didn’t know how to tone her body, but she doesn’t mind. He gives her more structure and more boundaries than Coulson did. She thinks that maybe the six months where he was gone and Coulson was here was designed to make her feel less constricted, let her find herself, and now that he’s here, he’s here to bring her back to form. She thinks that maybe Barton understands more than Coulson does that some people find an inherent freedom in structure and routine. She thinks that she and Barton are more alike than they are different. That frightens her. She pins him to the mat every time, beats him with a gun any time, but he tries to teach her to shoot and she swears more often than she hits the bull’s eye. It makes him smile, though he tries to stop, and they practice their languages.

She kicks him in the head and he drops like a stone to the map. She straddles him and slams his wrists onto the map. She leans over him, watching his eyes try to focus in on her face. He says, “ _Cogida duzu_.”

She says, “ _Mijn plezier_.”

He gets a bead on her and flips her. They’re on their feet and their hands are up and the crowd has gathered and she does not think she has felt so alive in years, maybe her entire life. She loves watching him fight others almost as much as she likes fighting him herself. He is an artist. She understands now why he is a sniper and an archer to boot because there’s something poetic and dark about both of those and she sees that dark poetic form come out when he moves. He moves like he’s made of water and she’s all fire, licking at the edge of him and he splashes over her. They both, they find out, have a dance background, and fights have a dance background, and for fun, one time, she spun away from him and made it a pirouette and he burst into laughter and she landed a punch for the first time that day. He never touched her more than was necessary to try and win the fight and the fights got longer and longer as his hand to hand improved and they finally called a draw. The audience applauded, and she knew it was for him, and she gave him a very small smile as she took a drink of water, trying to draw oxygen into her lungs.

He says, “You’re ready.”

She swallows the water in her mouth. Stares at him. Nods. She says, “When?”

The room is still. Barton is only looking at her. He says, “O600.”

She nods again. He says, “The briefing material’s in your room. We can go over it later.”

Someone cat calls and says,  _Oh so that’s what they’re calling it? Yeah, he’ll debrief you._

She’s over the ropes and has the offender by the throat and against a wall before she can even think. He is a fully fledged field agent. She’s fought him before and she remembers his weaknesses instantly. His eyes are wide now and he isn’t breathing. His body is writhing a bit, under hers, but not because he is making the effort, because his body is moving against his own accord. His mind tells him, she knows this from experience, that he should stay still but the body wants what the body wills and most people, not Natasha, but most people, most people cannot bring their mind over their body. He cannot. He is weak and he thinks that he will die here in front of spectators and no one moves forward to save him not because they think he should die but because they are afraid of her. She feels an old familiar ice fill her veins.

Then there is a voice and it is low, and quiet, and sure. “Natasha.”

Clint is at the wall. His voice is quiet but there is nothing casual about the way he is looking at her, about the way he is standing. He is standing like he is poised for another fight. But he is meeting her eyes and he feels steady next to her. He repeats her name again, just a quiet intonation, and she releases her arm from the offender’s throat. She barely hears him gasping when she turns and walks away from both him and Clint. She walks down the hallway, and up the stairs, and down the hall and up the stairs, until she’s walked circles around her head and the maze of the helicarrier and still ended up at her own door somehow. She codes herself in and locks it behind her. On the screen in her room blinks an incoming message and she accepts it.

 _Mission Zeta Delta Three. Andre Rufferion, age 34, 6’4”, dark hair, brown eyes, medium build. Married to Nira Rufferion…_  the automated voice drones on, debriefing her of a target who is using girls as drug mules in Western European sex trafficking circles. She absentmindedly thinks,  _two birds one stone_ , as she packs her clothing, reads over her cover, finds appropriate jewelry and makeup. She feels the self that she found here falling away. She feels herself finding Natalia Romanova again.

When she steps outside her room to go find dinner, Clint is waiting for her, his shoulders slumped, his face downcast, his hands in his pockets. He lifts his eyes and studies her and frowns. She walks past him and he catches up to her. “You want to talk about it?”

“Do I look like I want to talk about it?” she asked.

“You never look like you want to talk about anything and I doubt that’s actually true,” he says.

She thinks that he is right. She does not know what to think about that. They make their way down to the dining hall and everyone falls quiet when she walks in. She stiffens slightly, buys a sandwich, and goes to leave. Clint buys a hamburger and follows her. She says to him,  _does it look like I want company?_  And he shrugs but keeps following her. She takes her sandwich back to her room and closes the door in his face.

He texts her later that night: Let’s go over the mission information.  
            She replies: You act like I’m new to this. I’ve got it.  
            He says: We’re partners.

She does not reply.

Later, on the mission, he watches her as she seduces the mark, and finds out that he’s going to meet his partners in Central Europe to collect the girls, and the drugs, and meet the doctors who accept money to implant drugs inside of the girls. She makes contact with Coulson and Clint and tells them they could take down the entire ring. Coulson checks with Fury who says go ahead. Clint fights tooth and nail, says she is not ready, says she will disappear, and what are they all thinking, Central fucking Europe, she’s Russian and she could run into people who know her, and Coulson agrees with him. Fury does not. Fury gives Natasha the direct go ahead, and Clint is moving like lightning through a train station but he’s too slow to catch her as she follows the mark onto the train. He finds her ear piece on the platform and he smashes it on the rails. He tells Coulson she left him, Coulson’s furious with him and Fury, Clint’s furious with everyone, and he sets out again to bring in the Black Widow.

When she makes contact again, she has all the information to disable the entire machine: she has the doctor, his family, his medical license, the bank account where he puts the money, she has the people who kidnap and collect the girls, she has the girls, and she has the mark. She has every link of the chain. But she sounds exhausted and strung out and when she meets Clint at the extraction site, she’s bruised and has a broken hand.

He studies her up and down, and says, “What’s the other guy look like?”

She says flatly, “Dead.”

He should have known she wouldn’t have gotten it. But it hurt, how dead she looked, and he was angry and it was hard to hide that anger from her. He got her out and got her home, and in the debriefing room, he sat sullenly in a chair while Fury told her that it was a job well done. There was blood crusted on her face and her affect was flat. Clint could not figure out what was wrong, but something was.

 _Barton, excellent job tracking her down again. I’m sure that Agent Romanov agrees she will be in better contact but as a first mission goes, the initiative and restraint showed by Agent Romanov means the deprogramming and training worked,_ said Fury.

Barton flinched and said, “No thanks to you.”

 _For Christ’s sake, Barton,_  snapped Coulson.

Clint raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair. He repeated, “No thanks to you. She survived because that’s what she does but you OK’d a mission that was dangerous, for which we were underprepared, that took a month rather than five days, and she’s sitting here semi comatose and you think that went  _well_?”

 _She performed well and fulfilled the final test. We can send her on missions now._  Fury’s voice was slow and controlled.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Clint yells at Fury.

Coulson says,  _Agent Barton…_

Fury says,  _it was the mission. You were not informed because it was not important. You’ve never had a problem with a mission until this one._

Coulson says,  _Not exactly true, sir._

Clint points at him and says, “Fuck you. How fucking dare you send her back to the former Soviet Block this soon after her defection? And to handle a man who deals in girls? Are you fucking kidding me? How fucking dare you. You’re fucking crazy. You wanted her to become an asset but your’e fucking trying to get her killed or captured or get her to lose her fucking mind. Fucking look at her, sir, it’s going to take her weeks to come back from this. There’s something called walking before running. That’s why we picked that mission. It was in and out and simple and emphasized working as a team and instead  _you_  let her run rogue all over Eastern Europe like this is a goddamn video game and it’s not. The next time you give me shit about not playing by your rules, I’m going to remind you that you don’t play your own goddamn rules.”

He gets up and pauses by her chair. He says, “Sorry.”

And then he leaves.

 


	4. Chapter 4

****_We all have bullets beneath our skin  
we pray our lovers won’t flinch at when they find.  
We all have sirens in our light. – Andrea Gibson_

 

He leaves her breathless and staring at the table, her heartbeat in her ears, because no one has ever cared about how a mission affected her before, because no one has ever noticed how a mission affected her before, because she never realized that she could be affected by missions like this before. He leaves her there alone in the room with their superiors, like he did not just commit an act of insubordination that would get him killed in the Red Room, like he did not say  _fuck you_  literally to the face of the man who kept him employed, to the man he said was the best thing that ever happened to him. She never thought anyone could be the best thing that ever happened to her. She thought that the best things that ever happened to you were, in fact, things, inanimate objects, static happenings or events or objects. They could not be people, could they? People were always changing and could not be trusted. People could let you down. People could decide you were disposable. People could decide you were no longer necessary. People could not be the best things that ever happened to you. Except, when, in fact, he said it, he sounded simple and serious. Yet, if people were the best things that ever happened to him, how could  _he_  walk away after telling them to fuck off?

Coulson says,  _Agent Romanov. You are dismissed._

She said, “I am fine.”

He gave her a small smile.  _We never doubted it._

She almost says, “You should.” But she did not, because that would be to admit weakness and Natasha Romanov is not weak. She is not weak. Weakness is death. Weakness is darkness. Weakness is a ledger drenched in red. Weakness is not what Natasha Romonav wants to be. Natalia Romanova was weak. Natasha Romanov can not be.

She slips from the room and she keeps her head down as she moves back along the hallway. She does not go to her room. She goes to his room. She knocks on the door.

The door says to her,  _please identify._

She presses her palm to the pad on the wall.

She knows inside, it is saying her name and rank to him. She knows, inside, he is deciding whether to let her in. She gets her answer. The door opens and he stares at her, his eyes stone gray, his brow knit together, a cross dangling over his tshirt that read Archers Do It Better. She glanced at it, smiled a tiny bit, and he sighed, gesturing her in. He shuts the door behind her and she spins, leveling her gun at him.

He freezes, and reaches behind him slowly, his hands wide open, and opens the door again. He says quietly, “I’m not trapping you in here. The door is unlocked. I am unarmed.”

She lowers her gun and slips it back into its holster. She does not apologize. She doesn’t think he cares either way. His rooms, like hers, are plain and sparse. The kitchen/dining room/living room areas are all together and the bedroom wis off to the left. Everything is in white, but unlike her, Barton has art up. He has photos, a dozen cities, from the rooftops, from the edges of buildings, at all times of day. She recognizes the photos. She has been in almost every one of those cities. Paris, Sao Paolo, Moscow, Tripoli, Dubai, Victoria, Chengdu, Tashkent, Berlin, Kyiv, New York, and the only one she has not been in was taken from the top of an apartment building facing over an alley, towards a church. There is a child in a window and laundry on the line. It is beautiful.

“Budapest,” he says quietly. He comes over to stand next to her, his arms crossed over his chest. He shakes his head. “Most beautiful city ever seen from a rooftop, and I’ve never had a mission go well there. I’m cursed or something.”

“Or Budapest is,” she offers.

He glances sideways at her and raises his eyebrows. “Never took you for a superstitious sort.”

She raises her eyebrows in return.  “I’m Russian. We’re fatalists.”

He makes a small hmph and turns away from the photo. He says over his shoulder, “Want a drink?”

She shrugs. “Tea, if you have it.”

“One tea, coming right up.”

They sit quietly at the table and then she says, abruptly, staring into the mug of pale brown liquid, “How do you keep a hold of you, out there, and then when you get back?”

He frowns. “What do you mean?”

She lifts her head and avoids his eyes. “When you come back, you don’t need to find who you are, do you?”

He leans back in his chair. “Do you?”

She glances at him quickly. “Yes.”

He nods. “Yeah. Because someone got into your head when you were a kid and fucked with you, and then you had to break that, a couple of times, and now for the first time, you broke it and they didn’t remake you, you remade you. So yeah. That makes sense.”

She sips her tea. “You don’t lose yourself out there.”

“I used to,” he answers quietly, breaking a piece of bread into small pieces. “It got easier. I take missions but if I don’t like the call, then I don’t take the shot. I cover my own people, that’s that. They get that.”

She frowns. “You told me that Coulson was the best thing to ever happen to you.”

“He is,” affirms Barton.

She tilts her head. “Then how do you tell him to fuck off? How are you insubordinate?”

“Because Phil and I are friends, even if he’s my handler. He knows me. Knows how far to push me, when to tell me to sit my ass down, when it’s alright to let me mouth off to let me blow some steam,” he explains, and she feels his eyes on her heavy and curious. He says, a little lower, but not softer, not sympathetically and certainly without pity, “It’s trust, Natasha. He trusts me to be his friend and to do my job even when I’m an ass just like I trust him to make the right calls and I forgive him when he doesn’t.”

She says, “I don’t understand.”

He sighs heavily and reaches over the table, but doesn’t touch her. He says simply, “I know.”

Their next mission goes better. And the one after that. And the one after that. And then they go into a deep cover, not together, just her, and he covers her. For a year, talking only through code, only through discreet messaging and Coulson, and somewhere, every day, when she goes to work for work, she knows he is watching her, shadowing her, making sure she was safe, and it is stupid because she has a grip on herself by then, she knows who she is almost all of the time and she could hang onto that even in stressful situations, even when her boss gets drunk at a holiday party and pins her in a corner and gropes her and her cover alias would not retaliate, but sometimes, it didn’t hurt to think that if things really went south, he would be there.

When it is finally over, when they find the war criminal hidden away in layers and layers of secrets, when they get back to base, Barton swears colorfully in a dozen languages and then pulls her into a hug and they stand there, holding each other, until someone catcalls and Natasha releases Barton to go threaten someone’s life. They get a week off, and she spends it on his couch watching crappy tv and eating popcorn. He does not seem to mind. And then they’re back in the game. Again, and again, and again. They find each other’s weaknesses, and they guard them. They find each other’s strengths, and they utilize them. He teaches her that she is not a cold Russian, and she teaches him that snipers and archers and hawks don’t have to be the loneliest creatures, that spiders and spies with deadly thighs are lonely too, and maybe all the lonely creatures of the world like them were actually meant to find each other. She is Russian and they are fatalists, after all.

When Natasha has trouble remembering who she is and who he is after a mission, he sits with her on the roof, alert, and ready, and lets her scream and hurtle obscenities and fears at him. When he is distant and aloof after certain missions, for which he never gives her a specific reason, she is his shadow until he comes down, turns around and says, “Hey, there’s a ball game on tonight.”

They come up with words they call accountability words, and train them into their psyches.

He says when he is teaching her to shoot his bow, “What, like you say green and I say yellow?”

She releases the arrow in a huff and it misses the bull’s eye. She glares at the target. “No. They have to have memories associated with them. They must be grounded to something.”

“Yes, because you and I have the most pleasant memories,” he says, and corrects her elbow. She flinches at his touch. He releases it immediately and gives her room.

She says, “What is your favorite thing in the world?”

He says, “Thunder.”

She says, “Snow.”

She smiles at him over her shoulder and then releases the arrow. It finds its target.

She teaches him to dance, and if he stands a little too close sometimes, she doesn’t seem to mind.


	5. Chapter 5

  
  
**“love is like sunshine: sometimes you have to get burned**   
**to know you were there _and i want to know i’m here_**   
**every single part of me, my heart open as the river’s eyes**   
**the first time it sees the ocean**   
**my god look at those waves**   
**listen to that thundering tide**   
**can you imagine anything more frightening?**   
**can you imagine anything more _alive?_ ” – Andrea Gibson**

 

It only gets rough when they’re in Budapest.

Coulson is trying not to laugh at Barton when he tosses briefing packets onto the table at breakfast. Barton flips open to the first page, slams it shut, swears in Hungarian, and gets up to get more coffee. Natasha watches him go and then raises her eyebrows at Phil. “You shouldn’t have surprised him like that. You know how he feels about Budapest.”

 _I know how he feels about you_ , Phil says lightly and Natasha’s stomach clenches. Phil raises his eyebrows.  _He thinks you’re lucky. Maybe you’ll change his luck in Budapest._

“I swear to god, Phil,” says Clint, sitting down again. He puts another cup of tea in front of Natasha and says, without looking at her, “You’re going to hate this city, doll.”

“Don’t call me that,” she growls slightly, reading over the packet.

“It’s full of miscreants and angry stupid people with guns and a lot of anger at Americans—“

“I’m not American.”

“and—what? You basically are. You can’t make that argument anymore. What baseball team do I root for?”

“The Colts?” she asks innocently.

He groans and plasters a hand over his face. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

 _Budapest_ , prompts Phil.

“You’re going to hate it. There’s no tea. We can’t go. She has to have her tea, exactly like this. You really don’t want to see her without it,” Clint gestures wildly at her, his eyes wide.

Natasha raises her eyebrow. “I’m sure they have tea or coffee or vodka and if, if they don’t have any of those things, I’ll still survive.”

“But I may not.”

She grins, “No, you might not.”

Phil says tiredly,  _Can we focus? Budapest._

“I fucking hate that place.” Clint stabs his waffle for emphasis.

“I think it sounds like fun,” Natasha muses.

Clint looks put out. “You’re saying that to annoy me.”

“Yes,” says Natasha with a smile. “But also, we’re going to Budapest. Bring your nice arrows, dear.”

“Don’t call me that, dollbaby,” he says. He yawns. “Alright, we’ll read over the information and get back to you.”

 _You leave in three days,_  says Phil, watching them both get up.

“We’ll be ready,” Natasha reassures him.

“We’ll let you know if we’re taking this mission,” Clint says.

 _You’re taking it_ , says Phil in amusement.  _Didn’t you see what’s going on?_

“No.” says Clint flatly.

_Oh you’ll like this one. I know how you feel about watching Natasha’s back while she’s playing socialite._

“Oh for fuckin’ fuck’s sake,” Clint starts off in English and stalks off, moving through all of his languages.

Natasha says to Phil, “That wasn’t nice.”

Phil says.  _He’ll like it. Who ever thought that they’d be trading secrets on new chemical weapons by putting the codes into artwork? He’ll love making fun of people at art auctions. It’ll make him feel young again._

“I know. I mean it wasn’t nice for you to do that to him so he’ll do it to me,” and Natasha gives Phil a rare, small smile and then follows a ranting Clint out of the cafeteria, both of their briefing packets tucked under her arm. She does not know that Coulson covers his mouth for a moment, then strokes his fingers down his chin, then smiles, ducking his head and sliding out of the cafeteria.

Clint gets a text from Coulson later that afternoon when he and Natasha are sitting out in the sun reading over their briefing packers.

Coulson: are you’re sure you’re okay with Budapest?  
            Clint grunted and texted back: you didn’t give me a choice  
            Coulson: It is your job  
            Clint: yeah.  
            Coulson: You should tell her about what happened the last time you were in Budapest  
            Clint: She hasn’t read my file?  
            Coulson: Unlike you, she’s not a nosy git.  
            Clint: Point for using git  
            Coulson: Tell her, Clint.

Clint looks up and finds her watching him curiously, those strange sea-glass eyes of hers sharp and inquisitive. She doesn’t ask him who he was texting or what he was texting or why he isn’t reading the material. She just nods, once, lifts a shoulder and lets it fall, and goes back to bending over the packet, her long elegant legs stretched out to the side. She chews on a curl of her hair as she reads, a childish motion that reminds Clint just how young she is, how much younger than he she is. And it is needed at that moment because sometimes, when she makes eye contact like that, like she cares, he can’t help but to want to reach out and touch her, to brush hair back behind her ear, to touch that line of skin that was bright and pure and scarless as it fell from her ear to below the collar of her shirt. This is becoming a problem, this infatuation he has with the only partner he’s ever kept for more than a single mission.

“It turns out,” she says without lifting her eyes from the page, “that you learn much more from reading the briefing material than from reading me.”

Smoothly, he replies, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

He knows her tells. He can see a very small twitch in the corner of her mouth, the pause in chewing on her curl, and he knows that she is amused. That is enough, for now, and he idly looks over the maps of Budapest. He knows Budapest. He doesn’t need the maps.

“This should be easy,” she comments, sitting back on the palms of her hands. “It’s a stakeout and when they move the art, we go in and steal it back. We only have light covers.”

He rolls his eyes, “Knock on wood, Romanov. “

“Yes, I remember, you and Budapest, you have a history,” she replies casually, quirking one eyebrow at him. “What was it? A torrid one night stand? Did Budapest leave you in the middle of the night? Did you wake up hungover and sore and wondering where that beautiful blonde bombshell had wandered off to?”

“You seem to have spent a great deal of time imagining my sex life,” retorts Clint.

Natasha snorts in reply. “Clint, we haven’t had more than a week off in three years and I spent that week occupying your couch. I know what your sex life is like. It doesn’t exist.”

“I think that this falls under SHIELD’s sexual harassment policy,” he informs her and then yells at the top of his lungs. “SOMEONE HELP! THE WIDOW IS SEXUALLY HARASSING ME!”

Someone down deck yells back, “YOU LUCKY FUCK!”

Natasha is laughing and there is little, Clint thinks, that he wouldn’t do to make her laugh like that all the time. She grins at him. “You started it.”

“No, you did,” he says, grinning back at her despite himself. “I never thought of Budapest as a full figured blonde, to be honest.”

“Oh yeah?” she shoots back. “Then how’d you describe her? Because whenever you talk about her, it’s like some fucked up lover you keep going back to.”

He freezes slightly and blinks at her. He hears Coulson saying,  _tell her, Barton,_  and the implicit threat of,  _or I will_. But he is holding his breath because if he breathes, he knows what he will see: he will see a mistaken positive ID, an innocent girl killed because her fucked up father dressed her up like him and Clint was distracted, tired, exhausted, hungover and fucked up from, yes, being pissed at the world, pissed at himself, pissed enough to take someone home while he was on a job, too pissed to notice there was something ever so slightly off about the walk of the person in the suit and the hat getting into the car, he will see the mother screaming and he will hear his own mother screaming in his head and he will hear his father in his head because fucked up fathers in the world always end up doing that to him and he smells smoke and alcohol in the air and he shuts down because that’s what he hardwired himself to do a very long time ago, and if he opens his eyes—

“Snow,” murmurs Natasha, her eyes wide and she has scooted forward on her knees, her hand outstretched to him, but hovering in the air, not quite touching him.

He manages to say, “Thunder.”

Her eyes are bright and open and he sees the worry written in the irises of her eyes. She whispers, “Where’d you go?”

He swallows and says hoarsely, “Budapest.”

She frowns and sits back on her heels, and something swoops in Clint’s chest, and he aches in the increased space between them. She shakes her head and closes their folders. “We’re not going to Budapest.”

“What?” says Clint, surprised.

“We’re not going to Budapest,” she repeats. “You can’t handle it. It’s a trigger.”

“You can’t make that call,” he says, but he knows, he can hear the hope in his voice.

“I can. I’m your partner and you once stood up for me when I ended up in Central Europe on my first SHIELD mission and I’d expect you to repeat that little show if they sent me to Moscow, even now. I don’t know what happened in Budapest, but we’re not going to Budapest.”

He says, “Okay.” And as she walks off with their briefing packets, she touches his hair briefly and he closes his eyes, and she is gone.

He gets a text from Coulson: We’re sending Perry and Jules. Don’t worry about it.  
            He doesn’t reply and Coulson sends another text a few hours later: She’s very convincing.  
            He doesn’t reply and Coulson says: You’ll tell me when things change between you two right?  
            He replies: Why is that a when?  
            Coulson: Don’t lie to me, Barton.  
            Clint says: She should have one thing in her life that isn’t fake.  
            Coulson: You aren’t fake.  
            Clint: You know what I mean.  
            Coulson: You need a shrink.  
            Clint: Shit, I thought that’s what they paid you to do for me. Whoops.  
            Coulson: Haha, funny funny. Just relax. We won’t send you to Budapest.

But they do. A week later, Natasha and Clint’s cells go off at the same time during one of their fights where everyone is crowded around the ring. They both freeze and stare at them and go over the ropes at the same time. Natasha swears colorfully in Russian as her hands are too sweaty to swipe her screen open and Clint grins as he snatches her phone out of her hand, swipes the pattern over it, and hands it back to her. The onlookers exchange looks, raise eyebrows, and Natasha says something to Clint in Russian and he laughs, head thrown to the ceiling, until they both read a text message.

“I’ll pack,” Natasha says, grabbing her bag from outside the ring.

“I’ll see Coulson, see you at the jet in ten?” Clint says but he isn’t really waiting for her.

“Clint,” Natasha says quickly, and she can hear everyone in the room take a breath as she reaches out and grabs his hand. “We’ll be in and out. I promise you.”

He looks surprised at the contact but he gives her a quick smile and squeezes her hand before he drops it. “I know.”

And they’re gone, out different doors of the same room, and the spectators are left feeling like they witnessed a victory far more important than if Clint had won the fight.

Natasha means her promise. The two SHIELD partners were taken captive when they tried to break in and steal the artwork. They tripped the alarm system and Perry had been shot, badly, and they were taken captive, and reportedly tortured. Natasha and Clint aren’t there to get them out. There is a different SHIELD team assembling for that. All Natasha needs to do is disable the alarm system on the building they are being held, and then get the artwork that should have been stolen in the first place. And she knows, now, as she’s carefully rewiring the alarm system without tripping it, that she should have taken this assignment without Clint in the first place and there wouldn’t be two downed agents and a fuckload of paperwork for them to do. But she had let sentiment get ahead of her and she had wanted to protect him the way he defended her so now SHIELD hadn’t sent their best people on the job and Clint ended up in Budapest anyways.

She exhales softly when the alarm panel beeps and turns green. She closes the panel and tightens the screws on either side. She slips out of the building, pulls up her hood against the snow, and makes it three blocks before murmuring softly, “Green light.”

Phase one is complete.

She hears Clint’s heavy release of breath in her ear. “You took long enough with that, Widow.”

She rolls her eyes even though she is alone on the street. “I was being careful. How are you?”

There is a pause, and his voice is a little rough, and a little gentle, like he’s trying to be honest but reassure her at the same. “I’m fine. Still up on the cathedral.”

She almost says,  _stay safe,_ but what a silly thing to say to someone like him, someone like them, and so she just smiles a bit, and hopes he sees it, and walks through the streets to cross the street to the warehouse where she is going to make off with artwork more expensive than the original artist conceived. It’s December and it’s Budapest, so snow is falling and the trolley lines are slick with clumps of snow and ice. Adrenaline is keeping her warm but she can tell by the way others are walking, with their heads ducked so their mouths are covered by scarves and they don’t talk as they walk, that it is very cold. The Red Room fucked with more than her mind and body, they fucked with her physiology. She does not recognize cold, not like this, not like these people do, and she is no superhero, she is not superhuman, but in these moments, in a crowd of cold people where she feels nothing, she feels more like an outsider than ever before.

He’s quiet and low in her ear, knowing that Coulson and a dozen other SHIELD operatives are listening in for them. “Relax your walk. You look too purposeful.”

Unlike her. She is normally tuned into that type of thing. She’s wound up, thinking about the Red Room and about Clint and regrets for not taking the mission before. She sighs, pretends to check her cellphone, rolls her eyes, crosses her arms, and stops by a shop window, studying jewelry for a long moment. She starts to walk again and takes a longer route and she can almost feel Clint’s approval.

Then he says calmly, too calmly, “You have a tail, Tash.”

“Is it furry?” she murmurs. “Horse tail or a lion’s tail?”

There’s a pause and she knows he’s trying to figure out if she’s serious or speaking in code. There’s another pause, and he says, “Two now.”

“Sounds like a condition,” she says.

“You don’t need to keep me steady, Widow, you need to get off the main drag so I can take them out,” and his voice does sound steady. “I have a clear line on an alley two blocks up on your right. There’s a fire escape with an open window on the second floor. That’s your marker.”

She swears in Hungarian and he doesn’t laugh. She marks the fire escape and takes a right, pulling out her cellphone and pretending to make a call, slowing down slightly so the tail catches up with her, moves forward with the scent of the kill instead of being suspicious of the alley. It works. She does not hear the arrows. She hears their bodies drop, silent like stones, and she turns slightly, sees the two prone forms and pauses.

“Keep walking,” Clint’s in her ear and he sounds a little breathless.

“We need to know who hired them,” she mutters in response, and she walks back to the bodies.

She bends down, searches their pockets, their vacant eyes, their jackets, and their hands. She turns over their wrists, touching the inside, rolls up their sleeves, looking for a tattoo or mark of some sort. She takes off their shoes and shakes them.

“Incoming, Tash,” says Clint.

Natasha wipes her wet hands on her dress and shivers a little bit. “Nothing on them.”

“Widow, do you copy? Incoming.”

Natasha touches the knives in the back of her heels, the guns at each hip and says, “I got them.”

“No, get out of there,” he hisses and she hears him intake sharply. He is moving. He’s leaving his nest.

“You’re better up high, Hawkeye, stay where you are. Cover me,” she snaps low into the collar of her coat. She hears the slapping of boots on wet cobblestones and she counts,  _one, two, three, four_ ,

and she stands up, turning and firing at the same time. There are six of them and there are two many people in a small alley, too many chances for a ricochet, and just one of her. She knows the statistics. They are yelling in Hungarian to their fallen comrades and she’s starting up the fire escape to the roof when she pauses, catching Russian at the tips of someone’s tongue, enough to know that it is someone she may know, someone who shouldn’t know it was the Widow they were chasing, and she climbs the escape as fast she can, hand over hand, feet pounding against the iron and the sound of Clint in her ear calmly telling her what direction to go. She hits the roof, rolls, gets to her feet and runs north. She leaps across from one building to the next, lands, rolls, and hears the crack of gunfire behind her, hears screams. They are not hers and that’s all she needs to know.

She says, “Hawkeye.”

He says, “Widow.”

She says, “Location?”

“Two hundred and fifty meters due northwest of you. Stay where you are. I’ll make contact.”

She swears again. She swears because they’re going to be  _late_  now and she swears because  _they didn’t get the artwork again_  because she’s a fucking  _idiot_ and, “Tasha, shut the fuck up.”

She obeys. She catches her breath against a chimney when he appears around the corner, giving her no warning and she has a gun to his head and he has an arrow drawn and they look at each other and they laugh. Clint’s face is barely noticeable in the shadows but she sees the glint of his teeth in the dim light and he touches his ear.

“Made contact.”

Coulson says dryly,  _Get the art. Get out. Two simple steps._

“For you,” Clint says. “We’re in Budapest. Why did you ever think it would go right?”

Natasha covers his mouth, his breath warm against her palm, and she holds her breath. He stills next to her at her touch, and then his eyebrows go up. He hears it too. More company.

She mouths at him,  _Budapest._

He quirks an eyebrow,  _Right?_

This is how firefights go: they use up all of their ammunition. They are automated. They fall into a head space that is both a comfort and a fear. They fall against each other because they’ve done this a hundred times but never before together. Still, they know each other, the shape of each other’s bodies, the angle Clint’s arm takes when he’s drawing back an arrow with a tranq, an arrow with an explosive tip, an arrow that shatters on impact, and he knows by the way she reaches what weapon she’s found on her body next, what will be flying from her hands deadly and wicked, and he knows that she expects the combat to go hand to hand when she pulls the Widow’s Bite bracelets and snaps them on.

“Let’s get out of here,” he snaps sideways to her.

She doesn’t seem to notice. She huffs and says, “Cover me?”

“This isn’t our fight,” he reminds her. “We have a package to pick up.”

“They’ll track us.” She throws a well placed knife. He looses an arrow. They take out two more before taking shelter behind the chimney again. She has blood on her forehead. His shoulder hurts. He switches his bow to his other arm and shakes out his hand. She glances at him. “Good?”

“Yellow,” he mutters, but he can’t figure out where he’s bleeding. He checks both of his hands, rolls his shoulders, shrugs. “Good to go.”

She gives him a sharp look and nods. “You’re right, let’s go get the art.”

“Coulson, did you get that on the recording?” asks Clint in disbelief. “She said I’m right.”

 _For Christ’s sake, you’ve got incoming on all sides, get the fuck out of there,_  says Coulson.

They get out of there. But not fast enough. They fight their way out, tooth and nail, elbows to groins and throats and she is beauty in motion, flipping and spinning and scissoring through the air. He almost doesn’t see her, almost misses it, but then, he’s always had an eye for grace and his eyes are sharper than any other sense, and it’s hard not to watch her. It isn’t like Clint is bad at hand to hand. He was decent before and sparring with her has made him infinitely better than he was, but she’s taking out people at a two to one ratio to his hits. And at twice the speed too. He watches someone land a hit on her side, underneath her arm on her ribs, watches the flash of pain in her eyes, and then the guy is down on the ground, twitching from the Widow’s Bite.

And then there’s a splash of pain.

And everything goes black for Clint.

She sees him fall. She can’t get to him fast enough, sees the guy who dropped him finish him with a knife into the chest, and she screams, not his name, because her training kicks in for that, but it takes too long, too long for her to dispatch with the rest of the men, and one woman, for them to lay around her in a pile. And she looks around her, sees only destruction and for a moment, her mind blinks and she is Natalia, and she is Romanova, and she is one of many girls, and she has a ledger and it’s drenched in red, but her eyes settle on Clint and it’s like he whispers in her mind,  _thunder,_  and she whispers back,  _snow,_  and she takes a breath. It comes back to her in a rush. She is Natasha, she is Romanov, she is a woman on her own, and she has a ledger she’s learning to balance, and he is her partner.

She bends over him. “Barton, talk to me.”

He’s not.

 _Report,_  says Coulson, his voice terse.

“We need evac, now, medical. Barton’s down,” says Natasha, sliding her fingers into the collar of Clint’s coat and feeling for a pulse. It is faint but there beneath her fingertips. She says, “He’s still with us.”

_I’m sending you new coordinates to a safe house. Stabilize him and we’ll contact you with ex-fil instructions._

“Understood,” Natasha replies, and turns back to Clint. She says softly, “Come on, Barton.”

She drags and carries him to the roof, down a fire escape, hides in the shadows as more men with guns are searching the alleys for them. She holds her own desire for revenge, telling herself she needs to get him to safety. He is a dead weight and though he’s not much taller than her, he weighs more and she is sore and exhausted, but she can keep herself going. She checks her phone when she gets to the ground and decrypts Coulson’s message swiftly. It’s a safe house five blocks away. She exhales, slings Barton’s arm over her shoulder, and takes him through the alleys. People see her, step away, stare after her, and she knows there will be fallout from this. She understands fallout. She feels like fallout most days.

She presses her palm to the door and the door unlocks, lets them in, and she shuts it behind her, deadbolts it, checks it, and then dumps him on the floor while she checks the doors and windows, finds a gun in the foyer sidetable and clears the house, before sticking it in the coat pocket and racing down the stairs to him. She works swiftly, stripping off his coat, his second coat—“Christ, goddamn it, fuck you, Barton, grow some fucking balls, it’s not this cold”—and breathes a sigh of relief at his Kevlar vest. She tears it off, wrestles his tshirt over his head, and pulls off his undershirt with it. He has a nasty wound on his left arm, the one that was making him shake his arms in confusion earlier. She sits back on her heels and takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly.

“Barton’s unconscious but OK. Has a nasty arm wound but not bleeding out. I can’t find any other damage done,” she reports.

 _And you?_  asks Coulson.

“I’m fine,” she replies, but she doesn’t know if that’s the right answer. She puts Clint in a bed in the first floor bedroom and goes into the bathroom. She strips in front of the mirror, not seductively at all, watching herself with a clinical eye. She is bruised and battered and there’s a blade without the hilt stuck in her thigh and she thinks her right wrist might be broken, or just sprained, it’s hard to tell. She finds ice in the freezer, wraps her wrist, bandages her thigh and leaves the blade in. She knows better than to remove it. Not now, not here, not with Clint needing her. She dresses and treats his wound, wrapping him up, and smoothing his hair. She sits on the bed next to him but not touching him.

Coulson calls her.  _We can get you out in fourteen hours._

She glances at Clint. “He’s not awake yet.”

_Is he stable?_

“Yes.” She checks Clint’s pulse. It is still weak but it’s still there, and he’s breathing steady, so she can only hope he stays like that. She says, slowly, “Phil, I know who they were sent by.”

_Which ones?_

“The tails. In the alley. They had a mark on the heel of their feet. I’ve only seen it once before, but it was in Russia, and it was…well, it was by someone who did to boys what the Red Room did to girls.”

_Write it down so you don’t forget it, draw a picture, and then stick it somewhere safe. Let’s get you home before you debrief. This isn’t over yet._


	6. Chapter 6

  
**_Either way, this world  
has picked me enough times for the madness vase  
for me to know sanity is not_ **  
 **** _running from the window_  
when the lightning comes.

****_It’s turning the thunder into grace,  
knowing sometimes the break in your heart  
is like the hole in the flute._

**_Sometimes it’s the place  
where the music comes through. – Andrea Gibson_ **

 

It isn’t. Budapest papers would call it gang violence and they aren’t be incorrect, it’s just these are different gangs than they expected. Two shootouts in a two night period in the same neighborhood and one car explosion. They say it was a homemade bomb, and they aren’t wrong. It is Natasha’s homemade bomb flung at the car following them as they race to a private airfield. She is a Russian after all and she made her first Molotov cocktail when she was nine. She doesn’t let go of Clint’s hand the whole time.

He doesn’t wake up. Not in the day they are in the safe house, not on the ride to the plane, not on the plane ride.  _Major brain injury as a result of head trauma,_  say the doctors.  _Fuck you,_ Natasha screams at them.  _Fucking fix him._  They say,  _there’s not much we can do. He’ll wake up when he wants to._

So she turns to Clint in the bed and screams at him,  _Fuck you. Wake up and fucking yell at me like a goddamn man. Don’t just lay there. I know you can hear me. Fuck you, Clint, fuck you._

And they try to sedate her and she puts a nurse in the hospital for that. Instead, it is Coulson who coaxes her out of the room and then, to everyone’s surprise, the Black Widow says to him hollowly, “This is like the first mission all over again.”

 _No, this is like Budapest all over again_ , quips Coulson and he gives her a small smile.  _That’s what Clint always says when shit goes south, Natasha. Look, he never gets out of there without something. The city’s cursed._

“Or I am _,_ ” she says.

He shakes his head.  _No, it’s Budapest._

She says, “I’m not leaving him.”

_You can’t scream at the doctors or the nurses or him._

She considers this. She accepts his terms. They give her a bed in his room and she sleeps, not well, on the other side of the room. She spends a lot of time reading to him, perched on a chair on the side of his bed. She demands to know why he isn’t awake. The doctors tell her that he is not like her (they mean: he cannot heal the way you can. He is only human and he wasn’t fucked up like you) (she tells them: you are lying. He and I, we are the same, he understands why all the doors are open and all the windows are locked and why my gun faces east beneath my pillow). There was blood on the brain, they tell her, and she imagines his mind, blood splattered over his crystal clear beautiful thoughts and the way they brighten those eyes. She wonders if his eyes are bloodshot beneath his eyelids, beneath his eyelashes, but she doesn’t peel back the tape to check. She sits next to him, perched and small and broken herself.

She reads him Tolstoy. She reads him mission briefs. She reads him Anna Karenina and if her voices breaks on that opening line, he doesn’t laugh at her. He doesn’t move. But she thinks, in some tiny corner of her mind, or her heart, that he breathes easier when she is reading to him. She reads him the New York Times. She reads him the gossip columns. She tells him that that pop singer broke up with another boyfriend, wrote another song, died her hair. She tells him that the President denied again Area 51 ( _“I can’t,”_  she tells him,  _“believe that you keep asking about that. When will people start changing the number and really fucking with him?”_  And she realizes his sense of humor has rubbed off on her.)

She insists that Coulson sit with him when she goes to shower, and after a few days, Coulson insists that she goes and punches someone so she wouldn’t explode. She goes three rounds in the gym and runs a few miles before showering, and returning, and feeling a deep ache in her gut settle in relief when she sees he remains stable.

Her wrist was broken in Budapest and theoretically, she needs surgery, but she refuses it. Coulson tells her that she needs to accept the surgery and she tells him to fuck off. He shrugs nonchalantly and drops the subject. When Fury comes down to check on Clint and Natasha, he argues for the surgery too, and she tells him that if he, like the people who came before him, insists on things beyond her consent, she will leave.

He looks at the man on the bed with the monitors and say,  _I doubt that._

She bares her teeth in a smile and says,  _I’ll take him with me. Don’t challenge me._

And for whatever Fury thinks, he drops the topic. So her wrist begins to heal, a little wrong, a little less perfect than it was before, and a part of her loves that. The Red Room would have forced the surgery. They would have put her under, made her perfect again, and reprogrammed her while they were at it, and she wanted nothing to do with that. She wants to be imperfect. She wants a memento of imperfection.

Clint wakes, slowly, two weeks after they get home, while she is not in the room. She is running when her cell goes off and she checks it, slams to a halt, spins, and runs back, faster than she was running around the helicarrier, bolts through hallways making people scatter, and down to the medical ward where he is upright and talking to Coulson.

She stops in the doorway. She stares at him, at his open, bloodshot eyes, at his cracked lips and his small smile, at Coulson backing up. She says to Coulson,  _he needs water. He’s parched. You’re supposed to give him water. And chapstick. Look at him. I leave him for an hour and this is what—_

“Tasha,” Clint says hoarsely, and lifts a hand.

She plows forward because if she stops, if she stops and thinks about the way her heart is pounding or the tightness in her throat, she thinks she may cry. She says,  _I trusted you_ , and she isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Coulson or Clint but both men watch her warily.

Coulson says,  _He has to stay in bed. He can get up tomorrow._

“See? My brain recovers. Head injury schmed injury,” Clint says, putting both of his arms straight out to his sides and touching his nose with a forefinger. He grins at her from this pose. “Relax.”

“And since when did I become Tasha,” she snaps, fishing chapstick out of her pocket and tossing it to him. He catches it in midair and raises his eyebrow at her. She obligingly but grudgingly mutters, “Not bad.”

 _I’ll be back later with the doctor’s PT plan, Barton,_  says Coulson and then adds,  _Natasha._

 _Thanks,_ she tells him on the way out.

She sits in her chair and Clint studies her for a moment. He says, “So now you know why I hate Budapest.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “It was my fault. There’s no such thing as a cursed city and you’re not cursed with anything other than a partner with a bad case of hubris.”

He snorts. “That’s the most you’ve ever said to me in an entire sentence in three years.”

“That’s not true,” she says, but pauses, smiles a little bit and shrugs. “Maybe it is.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Tash,” he says yawning and closing his eyes. He murmurs, “Your hair’s almost red again.”

She had forgotten she dyed it for Budapest. She touches the ends of her curls, a little fascinated by what he said, by the observation, and then he is asleep again.

When he wakes again, the room is dark, and she is quiet, but awake, flipping the pages slowly of a book. For the first time in awhile, his vision feels crystal clear and she appears sharp  around the edges, like she should, because there’s little that is soft about her. He watches her quietly for a moment, not wanting her to know that he is awake, and he watches the stiffness in her right wrist, the way her left arm grips her right forearm absentmindedly, watches her eyes scan over the words. The book rests in the crease created by her crossed legs. She looks young and quiet and sad in the dim light.

“You’re awake,” he sees her lips say.

And there it is. His vision is sharp, but his hearing is not. His hearing was always off, “wonky” Bucky used to call it, but then again, it should be after getting kicked by a horse in the circus. But it was never like this. She sounds like she’s far away, underwater. It makes him feel nauseous to hear her speak. He winces, despite himself.

He shrugs and is careful with his words. “How’d you know?”

“Your breathing changed,” she replies, like he was asking her a stupid question. He guesses he was. She hasn’t looked up. He watches her for a moment longer and then she loops up, her eyes tired, and says, “Done staring yet?”

Something in her changed, he realizes, when he was comatose. She looks older, and younger, and sadder, and wiser, and like a thousand confessions had tumbled out of her mind and onto her shoulders and she doesn’t know what to do with all that weight. She stands, letting the book slide off her lap. She stretches her fingers and he frowns a bit.

“What happened to your hand?” he asks.

She says, “Nothing.”

And he knows he isn’t telling her about his hearing. She says to him, “Come on. Get up. They said you could start walking and lifting weights.”

He doesn’t remember this directive, but he trusts her so he slides his feet out of bed and waits for the dizziness to fade. He stands up, and she reaches out, catches him. Her hands are cool, small, and familiar, but he doesn’t remember her touching him before. He looks up, dizzy now from standing close to her, and she says something about getting him dressed. He lets her help him pull pants over his boxers, a shirt over his head, and he steps away. He shakes his head.

“I want to walk on my own.” He pauses and frowns. “But not alone.”

She nods and goes to open the door. He waits for her and then she turns and frowns at him, her head tilted quizzically. He says, “What?”

And she says, “Nothing,” but he is sure there was something. She gestures and he walks out in front of her.

It was the longest he had spent in the SHIELD medical bay since he arrived there ten years prior, and his body is weak. His body feels alien. He had never gone this long without shooting something or someone or running or climbing, not since he was too small to do any of those things and Clint spent a large part of his life avoiding that piece of his own personal history. He thinks this is why he understands Natasha. They’re avoiders who don’t avoid. They’re avoiders who avoid by overcompensating with confrontation in every other part of their life. He gets her.

She lets him rest a hand on her shoulder while he practices walking, and he stretches in the gym, watching her out of the corner of his eye. There is a silence to the helicarrier but it ends when it comes to her. The ship is eery quiet, and people are talking, their voices muffled, and then he looks at her, and all he can hear is the roar of his own body, his own heart, his own instincts. She moves like water and silk and fire, barely looking at him but always watching him. It takes him a few throws of the knife to get into the rhythm but when he hits the target, he sees her let out a breath she was holding and her eyes lift slightly. He asks for his bow and she gives him a look and shakes her head.

“You aren’t strong enough yet,” she says, and he lets her, even though no one gets to decide what Clint Barton does or does not do, and when he does or does not get access to his bow.

Coulson arrives, dismisses her, and she glares at him, and they have a low, heated discussion. Coulson is well, Coulson, and he remains serene and pleasant and Natasha storms off, her half dyed hair flouncing around her ears and she doesn’t even turn to say goodbye, or maybe she calls it, and he doesn’t hear it. He watches her leave.

Coulson says, “Walk with me,”

And Clint is relieved because he can watch Coulson speak and still understand him. Here is another person whose rhythms have matched Clint’s own.

They walk outside and Clint finds every step is a little easier, but he is a little more tired. They rest against the side of a plane, looking over the ocean. When did they land? Clint doesn’t know. He didn’t know they weren’t the air. Is he supposed to know this? He isn’t sure.

Coulson touches his elbow and Clint looks at him. Coulson says, “Do you remember Budapest?”

Clint snorts. “I always remember it. Yeah. I assume you debriefed Natasha though? She caught a tail right around Anna St and Diszter—that should have been a fucking sign. We should never do ops on streets called Diszter” and she ducked down an alley at my request. I took out both tails pretty easily, and she went back to check them for identifiers. I don’t think she found any—“

“She did,” interrupts Coulson quietly. “That’s what she hasn’t told you yet. They are operatives of the Red Room, or rather, the organization that ran the Red Room. They took men. Red Room was largely women. They weren’t there because of the art and those formulas. They were there for her.”

Clint nods, watching the ocean rise and fall and disappear as far as he could see. He says quietly, “So what are you doing?”

“Nothing. Just be aware. They’re looking for her.” Coulson says. He says even lower, “What aren’t you telling me?”

Clint glances at him. “I can still feel the effects of the concussion.”

Coulson nods. “Fair enough.”

Clint hates lying to Coulson. But he needs to, for now. They won’t let him train if they think he’s still feeling the effects of getting his head slammed into concrete.

Coulson says, “We may send her into the field before you’re cleared again. She’s starting to scare the shit out of everyone again.”

Clint smiles faintly. “Yeah.”

Coulson says, “Don’t say it like you’re proud.”

Clint laughs. “I am, though. What’s wrong with her hand?”

“She wouldn’t let us do surgery,” says Coulson bitterly.

Clint nods. “Sounds about right.”

He does not see her for the rest of the day, wherever she is, but he gets to go back to his apartment and he falls asleep in his own bed, dreamless and steady and his hand under a pillow on a knife and his bow within reach, so things begin to feel more normal even if his head still pounds and he still can’t hear. He dreams. He dreams of oceans and planes and fires and ponies and the smell of sawdust and the smell of smoke and someone crying and he wakes, wakes, wakes, with a start, his hand around the knife, his breath short in his breath.

Natasha is curled up in the chair by his window, her eyes open and bright but her hair is tangled with sleep still and she has a fleece blanket wrapped around her. She says something in the dark and he thanks whatever higher powers might exist in the world for his eyesight. “It’s me.”

He sits up and rubs his eyes and sighs. “I can see that.”

She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “I got worried.”

He studies her for a minute. She hadn’t left his side for two weeks that he was in the medical bay. Of course the first night he was back in his apartment she would worry and of course she came in undetected. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she should look vulnerable or defiant and they definitely would be choices. The real Natasha, the one underneath the mask and the one with sleep-knotted hair, she was simply tired and wanted to rest. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t asking for what he is about to offer, but he’s offering it anyways. He offers it because he knows she would offer it to him.

“C’mere,” he says, and he knows his voice is slurred, and he knows that he feels sluggish, but he slides back on the bed, makes room for another person, and watches her. She flinches. He says, “When was the last time you just slept through the night?”

Her lips quirk in her strange little smile. “Twenty some odd years.”

He says, “Lately.”

She says, “Before we went to Budapest.”

He says, “Yeah.”

She gets up and the fleece blanket slides off her lap. She’s wearing a tshirt and sweatpants and she looks startlingly normal.  _The Black Widow_ , he thinks as she sits cautiously at the edge of the bed, watching him over her shoulder. He says, “Hold on,” and pulls the knife out from under the pillow and slides it under his. She takes the gun out of her sweatpants and slides it under the pillow with a strange stillness to her face. She takes a knife out of her pocket and puts it on the bedside stand. She slides her feet under the covers and tightens herself into a ball. He doesn’t dare touch her. He just gives her as much room as he can give her, and he rolls over, sighs, and slips back to sleep. Somehow, it is dreamless.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**_The heart is a bullet that is terrified of blood_ **   
**_love is a windshield wiper in a hurricane_  **   
**_nothing is ever clear – Andrea Gibson_ **

It becomes a habit. She starts the night in her rooms. Slips into his. He starts sleeping on one side of the bed so she doesn’t have to have the moral struggle with herself in the time it takes him to shuffle his body over. In the morning, he usually wakes before her, watching her sleep soundly next to him.

These are the things they do not talk about:

They sleep better together.  
    It takes Clint two months to be cleared for missions after Budapest.  
   Natasha takes one solo mission without him and is gone six weeks.       
It is the longest six weeks Clint can remember, and it is the longest six weeks Natasha knows.

   His hearing never recovers. It takes him four weeks to tell her this, and he does it by text message. She doesn’t reply to the text, but the next time they skype, she knows ASL. He isn’t surprised that it took her a few days to learn an entire new language. She signs to him,  _home, home, home,_  and he replies,  _hurry._

When she arrives back on base, she is thinner, quieter, and tired. She walks up to him in front of many people, and he takes her by the hand, and walks away, and no one says anything. Not even them.  
           
   Natasha walks around these things with suspicion. She wonders if they are a false memory, if she is being given things that are not real to change her, to test her, like people would have done to her in the past. She approaches them in her mind and pokes them, nudging them with her foot of memories and her finger of disbelief. She believes they can’t be happening, that they are not real, that they are a trick. She does not, as a rule, sleep better with other people. She does not, as a rule, like to be touched. She does not, as a rule, seek out others’ company. She does not, as a rule, smile, or feel something akin to happiness. But she does, and it is frightening, and frightening more is his implicit understanding of her fear and his willingness to give her time to process.  
  
                        Clint watches these things unfurling between them and around them in an abstract fashion, like they are a magic trick. He grew up in a circus and he knows. There are three parts to a trick. There’s the pledge, the trick, and the prestige. The pledge is the way she sleeps next to him, her red hair long and tangled and beautiful, splashed like blood and roses across his pillows. The pledge is only when she is asleep. She turns, awakes, and here, here is the turn. He watches her train, watches her take out men twice her size, watches the way after the fight, she finds his eyes across the room, and she softens, slightly, for a moment, just enough for him to notice. And then the prestige, the way that she lets him watch her disarm, in more ways than one. The prestige is the hardest part to understand: in the way she enters his room, disarms herself, and he wonders, as she takes the cartridges out of the guns, if it’s trust in her, trust in him, or mistrust in both of them. He gives her space, because he needs it. It is a gift to her, and a requirement for him.

They do not touch inside closed doors.

 

They become, and it takes time and practice, and a few botched missions, and being yelled at by Fury, and Coulson flinching, and a few really good missions, but they become SHIELD’s best duo, and they know it. Things change. The world changes. They stop taking missions apart. They start sleeping together. They forget how it started. They forget where their first time together was because it doesn’t matter, because everywhere is the same when you spend all your time abroad. All he knows is that at some point, it was his name on her lips when she was at the precipice, and all she knows is that at some point, it was he who got to see her at her most vulnerable. He asked, and it was a quiet, sincere request that shook her at her core, that she brought only Natasha to bed, and not Natalia, or the Black Widow, or anyone else. And some nights, some nights when she was really rattled, they still slept in separate beds, one of them on the couch, because she couldn’t shake herself loose from her cover. He had his own ways of bringing her back down, bringing her back in, but they didn’t always work and sometimes it just took a few hours, sometimes a day, sometimes more.

The first time he sees her cry is when he takes her to the Statue of Liberty and she sees the inscription ( _Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door_ ). She turns into him, there, her hands covering her face, and her forehead against his shoulder, and he can feel her shaking. He wraps one arm around her, presses his mouth to her forehead, and just waits. Minutes go by before she can take a deep breath and wipe the tears from her eyes and nod to him.

They buy a house together. Coulson raises his eyebrows. Fury throws a fit. Natasha tells him to fuck off. Clint laughs until he cries. Later, at the bar, he tells Coulson,  _she trusts you. It took her five fucking years, but she trusts you. You know because she told you to fuck off._  And Coulson drinks to that, and then tells Clint that he shouldn’t have lied to him about his hearing, and Clint drinks to that, and the next day, Coulson hands Clint hearing aids made by SHIELD. They are nearly invisible and they hurt less and yet, Natasha looks sad when he shows her them.

“Why?” he asks, and touches her cheek.

She says, “I like talking with my hands.”

“There are better things you can do with your hands,” he says, pulling her by her hips to him.

She grins and says, “Yes.” And later, she rolls over and says to him, “I have killed a lot of people with my hands.” And he nods. And she whispers, “Talking with my hands makes me feel like my ledger is starting to even out.”

And he kisses her palms in a fit of romanticism, takes out his hearing aids, and signs to her, “ _You are home to me.”_  And she tells him, “ _They write stories about people like us. Damaged and rough around the edges and in love.”_  And he says,  _“Is that what this is? Love?”_  She signs back, “ _Love is for children.”_  And he watches her fall onto her back, staring at the ceiling. He almost misses her hands saying,  _“And maybe love is for people who never got to be children. Maybe it’s for you and me too. Do you think we’re so lucky?”_

He can only sign back,  _“I hope we can be.”_  Because he doesn’t know what else to say.

For years they do not take assignments apart, but then one day, during their one week off a year, they are sitting in a cabin in northern Montana when Natasha’s cellphone goes off. Clint’s hearing aids aren’t in and he doesn’t flinch but she figures, finding her phone in her purse, that she can answer for both of them. Coulson had texted her:  _I sent you mission material. We have an assignment for you. Top priority. Starts next week. Bonus: it’s in California._

She feels about California the way Clint feels about Budapest.

She grabs their laptop and clicks on the file in her inbox, waiting for it to download. She glances at Clint, and at his cell next to him. She hits the couch a few times with an open palm to get his attention. He turns to her and she signs to him,  _Did you get a text from Coulson?_

He checks his phone and shakes his head. She frowns, and begins to read the material. She gets halfway through the first paragraph when she slaps the laptop shut, practically throws it at Clint, and stops into the bedroom and slams the door behind her. He cautiously opens it and skims over the first paragraph, curses softly, and gets up to follow her into the dark bedroom. He finds his hearing aids in the bedside table and slips them in before flopping, ungracefully, onto the bed where she is stretched out with a pillow over her head.

“Hi,” he says warily.

“I don’t mind playing someone who is pretty and makes stupid men trip all over themselves,” she says. “But I thought… I mean, it’s one thing to seduce someone and have an out, a planned, end day, and someone covering you, if someone gets handsy. But this is different. Everyone knows Tony Stark. Everyone knows he is a womanizer. If SHIELD expects me to fuck Tony Stark to keep him in line and pliant, they have something else coming.”

“If they expect you to fuck Tony Stark into compliance, then we leave,” he says simply.

She pulls the pillow off her head and looks at him suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

“There are enough freelance jobs that we could do to live. If they ask you to do something you don’t want to do, we leave.”

She narrows her eyes further. “Who is we.”

He flinches. “I made an assumption.”

She is quiet. She pulls the pillow back over her head and makes a disgruntled noise. “Yes. You did. Where would we go? What would we do?”

“Freelance. I get asked all the time, and I  _know_  you do because I hear it all the time, and I hear you turn it down all the time. We don’t  _need_  SHIELD.”

“The medical insurance is pretty nice,” she points out.

He smiles at the pillow. “Yes.”

“And freelance tends to be more morally ambiguous.” She says, her voice muffled.

 _Ah_ , he thinks.  _Heart of the matter._ “I think your ledger is in the black, Nat.”

Her whole body rolls with the derisive snort she releases. “Like that will ever happen.”

It’s an old argument he doesn’t want to have right now. He says, “You just have to keep Tony Stark from going off the deep end.”

“Yes.”

“That shouldn’t be hard. You’ve been there. You know how to bring people back,” and he says it to remind her that he had, once or twice, hit the deep end, and she had walked around him, quiet and sure and stubborn, stayed as his shadow until he realized she was real and he was real and neither of them were going anywhere.

She says, “I have to do it.”

He says, “No, you don’t.”

She gets out of bed and says, “Fuck you. You don’t know.” And she’s gone, slamming the door behind her, and he can see her out the window, pulling on boots and a jacket even as she’s halfway into the snowdrifts.

            He lays on his back and thinks,  _what the hell._

            Later, when she comes back in, her cheeks flushed from the cold and snow in her hair, bright and beautiful and like she walked out of a fairytale, stomping snow off her boots and shedding her wet clothes in the doorway, he barely has time to say, “Thunder” to her before she says, “Snow. Snow, snow, snow,” and crushes him against the fridge with her mouth and her hips and her hands.

            She says against his mouth, “I’ll take the Stark mission. But afterwards, we need to talk.”

            He can’t get his mind out of the shadowy place. “About us?”

            “No, of course not,” she snaps, frustrated. “The thing. Freelance.”

            “Maybe also about your belief that I’m a mindreader,” he suggests.

            “Maybe you could work on that,” she says, “While I’m babysitting the billionaire in the red suit.”

            “I’ll get right on that. Right now,” he says, “I have something else in mind.”

 


	8. Chapter 8

  
**_Kiss me where the flames turned blue._ **

****_Tell me there are places on my skin  
that look exactly like the sky  
and your heart is a jet plane – Andrea Gibson_

 

            Three months later, she gets off the plane and makes her way to the airport bar. She has been on a plane or in transit for six hours and she knows she not only smells like airplanes and sweat and stale pretzels, but she feels like a gymbag full of stale pretzels. Her mind is buzzing and she is exhausted. But two days ago, she received a text message from a number she didn’t know that gave her coordinates and yesterday she received a text message from the same number that spelled out in morse THUNDER and Natasha is willing, just this once, to listen to a command.

            She walks into the airport bar, tosses her hair over her shoulder, and it has gotten long, and she walks the way she walked around Stark’s office. Eyes follow her. The bartender pauses and watches her. Normally this makes her sick, but mostly, she’s watching one guy in the corner in a rumpled leather jacket who is running a finger over the rim of his glass. He glances out of the corner of his eye, stares at her, smirks, and says, “Bartender, I’m going to need another one of these. And something for this pretty woman.”

            Natasha slides onto a barstool a few seats down from him, hooks her ankles together and leans forward a bit, making the bartender breathless. She can hear Clint’s barely contained snort. She says, “Vodka.”

            The bartender says, “And?”

            She smiles at him, shy, demure, bats her eyelashes a bit. She brings tears to her eyes and pretends to brush them away with the heel of her hand. She swallows hard.  She says in a low voice, “Just vodka. I just broke up with my boyfriend. I need something strong.”

            “Miss,” says another gentleman, sliding onto a bar stool. Natasha looks at him through her lashes, her eyes flickering to Clint who is barely repressing his grin on the other side of the man. He says, “Let me buy you a drink. That’s terrible. Quite an ordeal.”

            “Terrible,” agrees Natasha, and when the bartender gives her the vodka, she lifts it and says, “Vashee zdarovye!”

            “He’ll need it,” Clint adds from the end of the bar.

            “I’ll need what?” asks the guy between them, glancing at her strangely and then at Clint. He points at Clint. “Hey, buddy, you just leave her alone. She needs a gentle touch right now.”

            Clint’s now laughing into his cup. “Yeah. A gentle touch.”

            Natasha’s schooled her face into a picture of confusion but she brightens, like a schoolgirl. She says, “Bartender, another.” And when he pours it, she lifts it in Clint’s direction.

            His eyes are sparkling at her. He lifts his own glass. She knows that it’s water, or tonic water. Clint doesn’t drink. He says, “Za vas.”

            She can’t hold his gaze. It’s too much. He can be breathtaking when he’s not even trying and it’s been too long since she’s actually seen him. So when she looks away, a little shy, she isn’t pretending. She says, “Za tbya.”

            He smiles wickedly, “You move fast.” He buys her another drink and says, “I better toast to my luck. За удачу.”

            She throws back her head, laughs, and she lets herself smile at him, really smile. “За удачу.”

            He gets up and walks around the other side of her and she turns, letting their knees touch and he grins at her, sloppy, and rests a hand on her thigh. The guy behind her says, “Buddy.”

            Natasha leans on the bar, slouches, tips her head back and lets the vodka run down the back of her throat, warm and filthy and the way she wants him right then. She says, “За дружбу."

                  And his eyes get serious. He says, softly, “За нашу сильную половину.”

            She leans forward and kisses him, her lips warm and sticky from the vodka, and he slides a hand into her hair, pulling her closer. She slides off her barstool and in between his legs. She pulls back slightly, taking a shuddering breath. He kisses her cheek, her neck, her forehead, her eyes. Her mouth. Again. Again. He whispers, “Моя любовь, я скучал по тебе.”           

            She says, “мой ястреб.”

            He runs his hands down the outside of her bare arms. “Let’s get out of here.”

            “Please,” she murmurs as he slides a bill across to the bartender who is staring at him and then at Natasha, and as she slides out of the stool, she lets him take her hand and lead her out of the airport.

            He tosses her his cellphone when they reach the car. “Tell Phil you want two weeks off.”

            “Do I?” she asks.

            He pauses, considering. He shrugs. “Ask for three, minimum.”

            She says, “I want to talk with my hands.”

            He smiles as they slide into their seats. “Not while driving. I was gesticulating too much and may have driven into a cow last week. Phil’s not happy with me, either is Accounting or whoever the fuck deals with insurance over there. They keep calling me. I keep emailing them and saying, “Read the report. I was in an accident because I was signing, dumbass. Stop CALLING me.””

            Natasha feels breathless next to him but she doesn’t say this. She says simply, “It’s good to be back.”

            He squints at her a bit, dramatically as he pulls out of the parking lot. “You’ve never been here.”

            She signs, “ _You’re home to me.”_

            He keeps a hand on her knee while they drive, like he’s trying to keep her from flying away, but mostly he’s telling himself that she’s actually there.

            It takes them a week to get around to it, but finally, in an apartment overlooking Seattle, Clint decides he needs to talk to her. He wanders out of the bedroom, fingering the cross around his neck and wondering how exactly to approach this. She’s standing in a tshirt and her underwear by the glass window overlooking the Sound, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea, and she’s momentarily, terribly distracting. Her hair has gotten long and she keeps talking about cutting it but she hasn’t yet, and Clint doesn’t really mind. Her eyes are distance, and her face is a little sad. She has been different since the Stark assignment. She spoke of him with affection, occasionally, but mostly, she was quieter with Clint. She seemed determined to memorize him. She took her time around him.

            She says, in his moment of distraction by her long, pale legs, the way her t-shirt didn’t actually hide any part of her, “We need to talk.”

            He says, “I know.”

            She waits for him to pour coffee and stand at the window with her. He says, gesturing to her long bare legs, “Someone might see you.”

            She laughs. “Worried?”

            “For them, maybe,” he shrugs. “They might bike off a cliff or something.”

            “Hmm,” she casts him a mischievous sideways glance. She says quietly, “I’m not opposed to taking freelance, but I don’t like it, and I want it to have a goal. It can’t be this open ended thing where we do freelance just to get away from SHIELD. SHIELD isn’t the cruelest fish in the sea.”

            “Don’t we know it,” he replies. He says. “You sound like you have a goal in mind.”

            “Retire.” She says immediately. “I’m done. I want to…I want to clear my ledger, but I’m tired. I’m tired all the time. I just want this. I want to do mundane things like walk around cities and drink coffee and buy old used books just because they look like they need homes.”

            He wants to reach out and touch her, but he doesn’t. He says, “I can see that.”

            She faces him. “Together.”

            Clint gives her a halfway smile. “Was separately an option?”

            “No,” she says stoutly. “Not for you, anyways. I once told Fury I’d take you unconscious with me out of SHIELD if he kept pushing me.”

            Clint reaches out, picks up her right wrist and flexes it until she winces. “For this.”

            “There’s a tipping point for everyone,” she murmurs. “I don’t like surgeries. That’s when they used to mess with our minds.”

            He pulls her to him then, buries his face in her hair. He says, “So some freelance, some SHIELD, save like nobody’s business, and get out when we can.”

            She wraps an arm around his and nods. “Yeah.”

            He says, “So I guess I have to thank Tony Stark for something, huh.”

            Natasha looks up, grinning. “So there’s this thing. The Avengers Initiative. He was being considered for it but they decided he didn’t belong.”

            “Too pretty? Too rich? Too smart?” suggests Clint, frowning. “Why wouldn’t Tony Stark not be an asset for SHIELD?”

            “They decided that he doesn’t play well with others. Not a team player,” and he realizes when she says this, why her eyes are dancing so much. He frowns at her and she grins up at him, broader. “Yes, yes, it  _is_  Fury’s idea. What ever gave you that idea?”

            “Fuck,” Clint mutters. “ _We_  aren’t being considered, are we?”

            “Oh yes, we are,” Natasha tells him, positively gleefully. “Imagine what our scores are going to look like.”

            “I’m going to fail so hard,” muses Clint, staring over the city.

            “ _You?_ ” she sputters. “Imagine what they’re going to say about me!”

            “I think, Natasha, that any time I fail an activity or test involving teamwork or playing well with others, it’s fair enough to assume that you failed  _abysmally_.”

 

            There is some teamwork she excels at, and she proves it to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Natasha do a traditional russian toast, starting from formal "To you" to more affectionate endearments. In order so you don't have to scroll back up!   
> Him to her: Za vas -- to you (formal)  
> Her to him: Za tbya -- to you (informal)  
> Both: За удачу -- for good luck  
> Her: За дружбу -- to friendship (like a longstanding friendship)  
> Him to her: За нашу сильную половину -- To my stronger half  
> Him to her: Моя любовь, я скучал по тебе -- my love, I missed you.  
> Her to him: мой ястреб -- my hawk


	9. Chapter 9

**_You hold me so well_ **

****_that I am almost convinced  
that smoke in the mirror  
might one day disappear. – Andrea Gibson_

****

            It is two years, two years of working apart more than they work together, two years of globetrotting and finding solace in each other when they can, and they think, and say,  _only a few more years of this, then we’ll be set,_ and it is all going swimmingly.

            Then Loki fucks things up. Natasha’s brain shuts down as soon as she lands on the helicarrier, meets Coulson, and says, “What do we know?”

            And the look on his face tells her that he is lying when he says,  _Quite a bit. This is what happened._

            She stays up all night, reviewing the footage salvaged from New Mexico and she tells herself again and again that she couldn’t have saved him, there was nothing she could have done, and in some ways, better Clint than her turn into Loki’s walking zombie. After all, could Clint have gotten Dr. Banner to come on board? Natasha was not her best in India. She was scared and she wanted Clint back and she was going to take Banner come hell or high water, but they seemed tentatively OK since landing. She tells herself that he is in control. That if he was out of control, he would have transformed when she pointed a gun at his head. She reminds herself that he doesn’t like it when people call it “transforming”. The team is gathered and she ignores Fury, ignores Coulson, ignores Captain America and ignores Tony Stark who ignores her. She watches everything on the helicarrier.  _Who knows. Who knows about Hawkeye and is not telling us._

            But she can’t crack the code because there is no code to crack. Sometimes, she tells herself, things happen. She cannot get her brain into the right place. She argues and allows herself to be sucked into the SHIELD drama machine that churned out fights between Captain America and Tony Stark as much as it fueled the sexual tension between Stark and Banner, something that Clint would have been amused by but Natasha was merely confused by ( _really?_  She asks Coulson.  _Banner? He can’t even look you in the eye._  And Coulson tells her, seriously,  _I’m very intimidating._  And she says,  _Clint needs to be back so I can tell him that._  And Coulson tells her,  _I know._ )

            She knows that she should kill him when it comes down to it. But she can’t. It isn’t in her. She says to herself,  _I’d rather die._  And she knocks him out instead. They move around each other, distant, and quiet, and unsure, because she saw something in him that made her frightened of him for the first time in the seven years they had known each other, and because he feared becoming the monster he saw reflected in her eyes, the one she thought he could have been, the one he was, but that is what they won’t talk about, can’t talk about, won’t talk about, can’t talk about –

            They don’t sleep. They are in the Stark Tower, which Tony’s calling the Avengers Tower, but it is new, and Natasha is wary of sleeping in new places, and Clint is wary of sleeping, and he thinks she’s wary of sleeping with him this soon after his mind was not his. So they stare at the ceiling in the night, not talking about what they’re not talking about and it takes a long time, hours, that first night, after shawarma—Clint still isn’t sure what he ate—for either of them to say anything.

            To his surprise, she says something first. She says softly, “I thought I lost you.”

            He rolls onto his side, studying her profile. “I am still here.”

            She sighs and says, “I am still here too. Despite the world.”

            He smiles, the first time since before Loki. “Yeah. Despite the world. That’ll be on your gravestone. Pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it.”

            “I feel like maybe being born Russian is contagious and I’ve rubbed off on you,” she says, smiling, lolling her head to the side to gaze at him.

            He says, “I am still American. I bleed red.”

            She bursts into laughter, her body drawing into a ball. “That’s what they said about the Communists.”

            “Fuck.”

            She grins. “You still don’t know history.”

            “You still don’t know a single American baseball team.”

            “The Yankees.”

            “You still know how to make me want to puke.”

            “You still are hyperbolic.”

            “You still possess a ridiculous vocabulary for a woman who barely talks to people who are not—“ he pauses because he was going to say Coulson and himself.

            “You are still sad.”

            He touches her hair. “You are still blunt.”

            “You are still wearing your hearing aids.”

            “You are still stubborn.”

            “You are still the best damn archer in the whole damn world.”

            He signs, “I still love you.”

            She signs back, “is that a confession?”

            He says, “You still love the sign for confess.”

            She says, “You still love.”

            He says, “I guess he didn’t take everything.”

            She says, smiling. “You still are the master of the understatement.”

            They still don’t sleep. They lay away, passing between them all the things they still had, but when they cannot sleep the next day, Clint suggests they take up Bruce on his offer of sleeping pills. Natasha throws things across the room and reminds him what she thinks of artificial substances that cause her to lose control of her own sleeping patterns. He reminds her that her recent experience is unusual. She points out that she is somewhere new and she doesn’t know who will come through the door. It takes a long negotiation, but eventually, she agrees, and Clint leaves their rooms and wanders to the team’s kitchen.

            He can feel the eyes on him as he walks in and the conversation dies. He clears his throat. “Hi.”

            “You two haven’t left the apartment since we got back,” says Tony. “I’m impressed. I get the post mission sex thing, trust me but stamina after Loki didn’t let you sleep? Whoa.”

            Clint replies tiredly, “I don’t have time for your bullshit, Stark. I can’t sleep because, well. Because.”

            “Because reasons,” supplies Steve who is at a laptop. He looks up and blinks. “I read it on the internet.”

            Clint frowns. “Right. I can’t sleep. And Natasha can’t sleep because we’re in a new place. So we’d like to take you up on the offer of sleep aids, Dr. Banner, but only if—“ he looks to Steve. “If you’re able to guard the door. From the outside.”

            “Me?” asks Steve.

            Clint nods. “She asked for you specifically.”

            Steve looks flustered. “Well. Yes. Okay.”

            Clint says. “Good. Because I need to sleep. And she needs to stop breaking your shit, Stark.”

            Tony shook his head. “That woman…I’ll never forgive her, you know.”

            Clint says, “You and every other man she’s ever walked past.”

            Bruce looked at Tony and said, “Should I be jealous?”

            Tony snorts, “Legolas over here should be jealous of me. Tell her to stop breaking my shit.”

            Later, when Clint tells Natasha this, as he’s watching her swallow the pills, she rolls her eyes and says, “I’ll fucking break his balls if he says that to my face.”

            Some things are still as they were.

 

 

 ** _I know this world is far from perfect._**  
 **** _I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon._  
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.  
But every ocean has a shoreline  
and every shoreline has a tide  
that is constantly returning  
to wake the songbirds in our hands,   
to wake the music in our bones,  
to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river  
that has to run through the center of our hearts  
to find its way home. – Andrea Gibson

  
****

 


End file.
